Category - Literature

Kay Gabriel Literature Poetry

Collaboration 3

Kay Gabriel   i. Swam in a lake of it, got typically fucked Took stock of bathing coupons: half a chunk  of trophy on display, the marble auction, from where the guests come in. On the right side the cradle of her thigh  a mini world limned in that slit rounded, undraped, but fuller in the...

John Elizabeth Stintzi Literature Poetry

Limp Wrists

John Elizabeth Stintzi Now— Winnipeg, MB. Near Confusion Corner Winnipeg was once a wide world. Now wider than it seems, it is a cool spread thin. Now it is a hill of small favours, of small livings and hush nights and hard windows we view through. A city of voyeuristic perches perennial...

Literature Nat Marshik Poetry

Drinking Sasparilla Root Beer at Donner Pass, 1999

Nat Marshik   1. I took an heirloom sip in thick pine needles, feet sunk in forest hands cool around the blue bottle with its flip top and old timey label and tasted with my twelve years the sweetsap pioneer story—fascinated by that emaciated winter, death in the high snows the icy unsympathy...

Andrew Sarewitz Creative Non-fiction Literature

Stephen Was

Andrew Sarewitz Friendship comes easy for me. It always has. Love is a wholly different card game. When I finally met the man I felt was my life-long love in Stephen, I was sure and contented. At twenty-seven, it seemed like I’d searched an eternity to find the real thing. I had known who...

Literature Poetry Shelley Marie Motz

She Who Kneads the Dough to Lightness

Shelley Marie Motz   I have been dreaming of bread. Warm and round. Buttered. Dripping. Dreaming of braided bread Sweetened with honey. My Greek neighbour Maria’s kitchen Steaming with daughters and laughter. I prepare the dough: Water. Salt. Yeast. One bowl. Two hands. Desire. I pour and...

Ambika Thompson Fiction Literature

Are You Jesus?

Ambika Thompson   [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap] was making an egg salad sandwich when Charlie called over. I told him, before he could get a word in edgewise, that I had lost a tooth...

Kayla Czaga Literature Poetry

Naanwich Was the Last Thing

Kayla Czaga Do you remember the baseball diamond beside which we ate naanwich, Liz? It tasted nothing like butter chicken. We’d wandered all morning without eating and hunger revealed to us the aggression in nearby seagulls. I loved your light lisp, how softly you smelled of vegetable broth. I...

Creative Non-fiction Greg Marshall Literature

Our Longest Point

Greg Marshall Only after Dad broke his neck diving into the ocean in Hawaii did we start playing tennis together. Partly, this was a matter of timing. I was ten at the time of the accident; Dad was forty-two. More importantly, though, it was a matter of handicapping. It took Dad fracturing his top...

Literature Meaghan Rondeau Poetry

Meet the Author

Meaghan Rondeau 1999 I announce that I don’t want kids. My mom’s reply: “You’ll change your mind when you’re older. Life is meaningless—” She actually says this! I shit you not! Meaningless! “—without children.” Years later, I tell her that remark still bothers me. She says, “I never said that.”...

Julian Paquette Literature Poetry

My Masculinity

Julian Paquette My masculinity is red and hot, excited and vibrant—a body that’s been too long ignored. An acutely sensitive organ of denial. My masculinity is tight and wants to loosen. I can feel the tension of repression against it. I can feel myself opening to my man. My voice lowering; my...

Esther McPhee Literature Poetry

What Will Sustain Us through the Winter?

Esther McPhee i. It’s not spring weather yet but I want it to be. Winter’s lasted too long—I’m still not accustomed to the strength of east coast snow and I miss the rain, how February at home marks the first of spring, thaw of green frost and the crocus beginning. But here Joel starts...

Christine Higdon Fiction Literature

Promoted to Glory

Christine Higdon   [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]omorrow, I’ll be the same age he was when he died. He was ten days short of seeing the first man on the moon. We six were...

Erin McIntosh Literature Poetry

fragments from the belly of the whale

Erin McIntosh   they told me i would be like jonah, minus the comfort of speaking directly to god. i told them alright. all is well. stuck swimming in my own little world, waiting for the whale my saviour to scoop me up in his jaws, some man who could carry me to where i needed to be. i want...

Literature Lucas Crawford Poetry

I Lie on the High Line

 Lucas Crawford   I. I never went to the High Line or sucked transgender clit or dick. I never asked for three free samples at Milk Bar’s lower eastside locale; it’s just that I never find enough to lick. I never asked a stranger to pull over his car so I could take a hot dump in the woods. I...

Julian Gunn Literature Poetry

Nephrophilia

Julian Gunn   Lemon drops. Bitter torque. Al Pacino cruising for watersports. Born again by stoma, your new topology. A hole as always the gap of meaning. In medias res: Seattle. Nephrophilia. The scene in the basement. The old boyfriend pissing on the floor. A student of the body on hands and...

Andy Sinclair Fiction Literature

The Henry Moores

Andy Sinclair   [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]S[/mks_dropcap]orry for the impersonal nature of this message but I wanted to let you all know that I am making a clean start! Dave and I have decided to...

Billeh Nickerson Literature Poetry

Winnipeg Sucks

Billeh Nickerson   When my friend challenged me to write a poem about the Winnipeg police who accidentally turned on the speakers to their taxpayer-funded helicopter only to broadcast a lurid tale of blowjobbery and oral salaciousness to the communities below I was momentarily titillated as...

Fiction Literature Meaghan Loraas

Brian

Meaghan Loraas [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]B[/mks_dropcap]rian is irritated that the television isn’t working. I tell him not to do it but he’s sixteen and he does what he wants. He grabs my broom. He...

Charles Demers Creative Non-fiction Literature

Excerpt: The Horrors

H for Heteronormativity Charles Demers When I was about twenty years old, my brother around seventeen, our dad took us out for what was meant to be a nice family dinner at one of Vancouver’s tackiest sushi restaurants. Fairly close to a university, the place’s tagline was “Miso Horny” (Get it? Just...

Adam Meisner Literature Poetry

Leaving New York  

after Frank O’Hara Adam Meisner   I’m leaving New York, again. Under swept trusses & skirting Harlem at the early hours of Columbia’s Sunday young. The drive piddles over the Washington & under another flag– the progeny of powdered wigs held higher ten years after I watched a...

Literature Marcus McCann Poetry

Poem for Scott Who Gave Me Conjunctivitis

Marcus McCann   Scrapper, if swollen open lids allow before the vanity—cramped, lit like discount grocery—I’ll tilt my skull back, squint, note this bacterial shiner, sacré coeur eye patch. A nightbird laid a heavy pink shit in my socket. A camera is a bad eye, my eye now a bad camera. You...

Creative Non-fiction Literature Nicola Harwood

Halloween

Nicola Harwood   Note about names and pronouns: Names have been changed in this story to protect privacy. Around the age of seventeen, Antwan changed her name and asked to be referred to as female. She has asked that we use male pronouns when referring to the times before then when she still...

Jade McGregor Literature Poetry

Railway & Steveston Hwy

Jade McGregor   When I say poetry saved my life I should mention other forces– by 1999 all the cars cruising the kiddie stroll had power lock doors, crystal meth turned the girls —Amber Dawn, titular piece, How Poetry Saved My Life   My mother lived beside herself in fear I...

Arleen Paré Literature Poetry

I Steel Myself

Arleen Paré   if anyone asks tell them I’m sane as stainless steel I heat the pot before I make the tea when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock I stand stock-still behind the drapes I harden myself against the swords of winter rain against December’s bucket of black night before they hatch I do not...

Jillian Christmas Literature Poetry

The Gospel of Breaking

Jillian Christmas   Dear God, Is it wrong that so long after our separation, I still see your face everywhere? The holy water between my legs when she touches me The wet in her eyes, head pressed back, her sinner mouth too full of heaven This bruised knee city Springing with all the wrong...

Fiction Literature Morgan M Page

Rental

He's got one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh, and Mae can't quite remember but she's pretty sure this is what love feels like.

Creative Non-fiction Literature Sierra Skye Gemma

Spare Change

Sierra Skye Gemma This piece first appeared in Plenitude magazine, Issue 2. Published here with permission from the author. The first time I see Stacey, I am standing in front of the courthouse on S.W. Morrison, in downtown Portland, Oregon. I’m with all the other punks in our usual spot. This is...

Literature Poetry

Honeymoon

Pamela Mosher   How to prepare for the bed and breakfast lavish with tajines and import rugs, absurd with Québecois music and Americans who couldn’t afford Paris? We couldn’t believe our room of roped curtain, in-suite fireplace, and crystal wine glasses (we filled with cheap depanneur red) We...

Fiction Jen Currin Literature

Beach Story

One ex-wife was looking sexy in a retro green bikini with a built-in, conish bra. She seemed taller than she had the summer before, her legs longer, her toenails redder.

Literature Poetry Sugar le Fae

Silva for Sylvia Plath

Sugar le Fae   —after Collin Kelley’s “Saving Anne Sexton” In the library in Florence, Mass, I found her shriveled up small, a sibyl living in the hollow of her own book: a flask, a handgun, neatly rolled cash. Everywhere you looked, her curls!— in the red cursive script across the cover, in...

Joelle Barron Literature Poetry

All Summer Growing

Joelle Barron All summer I’m growing: sugar snaps, raspberries, fat tomatoes streaked red and green. Plants are easy to love. My dog stretched out on the spruce-shade lawn is easy to love. Flutter in my belly might be you, might be gas. Too early to tell, but every night I drip milk. I...

Creative Non-fiction Literature Rhiannon Catherwood

Squeaky Wheels

Rhiannon Catherwood When I was ten years old, I ran away by accident. Every day at recess, I sought out the same secluded alcove in the outer wall of the school. I would sit, take out a spiral notebook, and write, relying on a plastic digital watch to let me know when my thirty minutes were up. The...

Alex Leslie Literature Poetry

A short history of my writing career

Alex Leslie   We’ve changed You said to me “your assorted minority identities” I misheard it, my sordid minority identities I routinely mishear labels as compliments this is a survival skill I don’t remember not noticing acquiring this skill You are so articulate have you considered being a...

Creative Non-fiction Literature Neve Be

Virgins in Time

Neve Be The best sex I’ve ever had was with a sixteen-year-old boy. The thing is, at the time, I was also sixteen. And no, I’m not saying that my literal high school experience was full of good body feels and good sex, because it wasn’t. This hot, affirming sexual experience took place in May of...

Justin Karcher Literature Poetry

Message in a Bottle

Justin Karcher   Sam, we have to clear our mental garbage. It will take work to mend these holes. If we don’t, We’ll end up marooned on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spanning waters from the West Coast Of North America to Japan. Garbage is magnetic. It flocks to other garbage, like blood...

Fiction Literature Rachel Charlene Lewis

From the Paint Stains

Rachel Charlene Lewis   [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]I[/mks_dropcap] keep losing my colouring; I am a blob of human. I should probably see a therapist, but for now I’ll stick to drinking a lot of...

Daniel Zomparelli Dina Del Bucchia Literature Poetry

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli   1. I don’t really remember much these days, when the bones arrived I talked about paper or the way glass isn’t something I want to be around. Did you remember the way love works, I told you once in a small elevator that the world closes in...